alphadogg writes “Google Talk, a desktop and mobile text and voice chat service used by many Google Gmail customers, suffered a widespread outage Thursday morning that the company said was affecting ‘a majority of users.’ The outage, first reported by Google a little before 7am eastern time, was being restored about 4 hours later, according to Google. Meanwhile, users of the downed cloud service took to Twitter and other avenues to voice their displeasure.”

An anonymous reader writes “Road traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi and Dubai plummeted last week — and the local police have a theory as to why: drivers’ BlackBerrys weren’t working. Police in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have claimed that last week’s worldwide BlackBerry outage, which frustrated business people around the world who were unable to communicate with their colleagues, had one positive result — less texting and reading of emails by people who should have been concentrating on driving instead. There could be other factors at play, however. For instance, popular UAE soccer player Theyab Awana was killed in a high speed crash near Abu Dhabi in September, amid claims that he was sending a message on his BlackBerry when he hit a lorry. The football star’s father, Awana Ahmad Al Mosabi, made an emotional plea to people not to use smartphones while driving, and a Facebook campaign against the use of BlackBerry Messenger while driving has grown in popularity.”

iONiUM writes “With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry’s service be a nail in the coffin? From the article ‘The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.’” This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what’s happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.

iONiUM writes “With increasing pressure on RIM to catch up to the new phones, and the upcoming release of the iPhone 4S, could this three day outage of BlackBerry’s service be a nail in the coffin? From the article ‘The service disruptions are the worst since an outage swept north America two years ago, and come as Apple prepares to put on sale its already sold-out iPhone 4S on Friday.’” This is the same outage as was reported Monday. RIM has released a few details on what’s happened: a failed software upgrade brought the system down, and, after repairing the first issue, the backlog of traffic overwhelmed their network infrastructure taking things down a second time.

rtfa-troll writes “Microsoft is preparing its customers for plenty of outage time according to the Register, with a scheme for Office 365 which will give customers some money back. The offer seems to be Microsoft’s answer to Google offering a ’100% uptime guarantee’ (they even pay for maintenance time) The most interesting thing about the scheme is that you can have a one and a half day outage every month (or is that 18 solid days a year?) and still expect to pay half price. I wonder Microsoft have put the Sidekick management in charge of their customer’s data. Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again.”

rtfa-troll writes “Microsoft is preparing its customers for plenty of outage time according to the Register, with a scheme for Office 365 which will give customers some money back. The offer seems to be Microsoft’s answer to Google offering a ’100% uptime guarantee’ (they even pay for maintenance time) The most interesting thing about the scheme is that you can have a one and a half day outage every month (or is that 18 solid days a year?) and still expect to pay half price. I wonder Microsoft have put the Sidekick management in charge of their customer’s data. Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again.”